Miami Midnight (22 page)

“Darling,” he murmured. He tried to nuzzle her hair. “We’re engaged, remember?”

Gaby was certain Dodd would never pressure her. He was too conservative to come right out and say they were alone in the house, and that he wanted to make love to her. “Dodd, I love you,” she said gently. “But it’s late.”

“Yes, I know, darling.” His hand brushed her cheek. “Have I told you how beautiful you are?” His voice deepened with desire. “Oh, Mouse, I want you so much.”

“Dodd, with my mother in the hospital, your mother in the hospital...”

He stepped back, his face in shadows. “And your job. Yes, I know.”

“Well, it is a lot to cope with.”
Just give me time,
she pleaded silently.
Give me time to forget someone else! God knows I’m trying
.

He turned his head away, his shoulders hunching slightly. “This house has a damned musty smell,” he said abruptly. “The roof still leaks, doesn’t it?”

“Everything leaks. Including the plumbing. What does it smell like?”

“I can’t tell.” He looked back at her. “It’s not important. Who did you say is renting the garage apartment?”

“Just somebody.” She took his arm and steered him toward the door. “In return for the rent he’s going to keep the place tidy, do all the yard work.”

Dodd stopped at the open door.
“He?”

“A friend of a friend who works on the newspaper.”

He was frowning now. “Gaby, I told you I’d be willing to pay for someone to—”

To silence him, Gaby threw her arms around him and lifted her face to be kissed. With a groan Dodd crushed her to him, his mouth covering hers hungrily.

It was one of the few times they’d kissed in the past week, and Dodd’s mouth was warm and fervent, the kiss everything it should have been. Gaby felt a sudden pang of regret for the lovemaking he so obviously wanted to give her. She started to tell him to close the door and come back inside.

“It’s not a smell,” he said, lifting his head. “It’s something else.” He sniffed the air, puzzled. “Like the night you had the prowlers.” He let her go and stepped back. “Damn, I need to check this house every time I bring you home. Stupid of me to forget that.”

He walked away, leaving her standing there, his footsteps echoing in the silent house as he crossed the sun room. She heard the back door slam, then the crackling sounds of underbrush being pushed out of the way as Dodd made a circuit of the outside pathway. When he returned to the front door, he said he’d found nothing.

“I thought it might have been a dead rat smelling up the place,” he said as he gave her a brief, warm kiss good-bye. “Put it down on the list of things to do. Get this place fumigated before you sell it.”

“Am I going to sell it?” she asked softly.

He groaned. “Mouse, darling, try to give it some thought, will you? There’s no other way out for you. Or your mother. Selling this old place will just manage to bail you out as it is.”

He gave her a final peck on the cheek before he turned and went back to his car.

A few days later, as they were trying on their Vizcaya ball costumes at Robarts Rentals, Crissette told Gaby that David Fothergill had a job. He was working for a commercial garbage collection company in the city of Hallandale, north of Miami.

“Another job off the books,” Crissette said sarcastically. “He called me and told me and wanted to take me someplace to celebrate getting a job, some Jamaican cheap food dump over in Hialeah. I told him to get lost.”

Crissette had selected an eighteenth-century Venetian
cisisbeo
’s outfit of satin coat, bicorne hat, and tight scarlet satin breeches. As a long-legged Venetian gigolo she looked exotically unisex.

“In drag yet,” she muttered, turning to view her back. “The things I do for the
Times-Journal
.” She adjusted the tails of the satin coat. “I wish somebody’d take
me
to Regine’s. I understand it’s drop-dead terminal chic.”

Gaby shrugged. “It’s okay. We were celebrating being engaged. And Dodd’s a member.”

The fitting room was filled to overflowing with discarded costumes. Gaby pushed a pile of gondoliers’ striped shirts out of the way and tried to sit down on the one chair. The large hoop she was wearing under her skirts wouldn’t fold properly. She stood back up. “Crissette, you look sort of decadent,” she said.

“Believe me, honey, I’m straight. But if I wear those flats with the pom-poms on the toes I’ll walk like you can’t tell. How’m I supposed to wear all this fancy Italian drag and manage a lot of camera equipment too?” she complained. She abruptly pulled Gaby around to the mirror. “Okay, kid, now it’s your turn.”

They stood side by side, regarding themselves in the three-way glass. Gaby’s elaborate gown had originally been made for a principal player in a Coconut Grove Playhouse production of
Twelfth Night
. The actress had had unimpressive bust measurements, but an unusually tiny waist. The eighteenth-century court dress was made of blue watered silk with gold bead-crusted panniers in yellow moiré. The bodice was cut low and square so that Gaby’s breasts, pressed together, looked seductively full. The sleeves were tight and ended at the elbows, and the skirt was ankle-length—a blessing since she was going to have to do a lot of walking through the museum grounds.

Gaby stared at her reflection, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She looked amazingly doll-like, she thought, fragile—and sexy, even with her tawny hair an untidy mess from trying on costumes. For the first time, viewing the beautiful gown, she could understand why the eighteenth century was considered such a libidinous era.

Crissette was staring, too. “Hey, you’re one foxy lady, Gabrielle. You sure have changed from the scared-looking chick who came into the newsroom that first day.”

Gaby was startled. The words struck a strange chord somewhere in the back of her mind that she wanted to forget. “I haven’t changed that much.”

“I dunno. I think getting engaged has done a lot for you, girl.” The other woman’s luminous eyes surveyed her critically. “Before, you looked like somebody who’d never been loved up, if you know what I mean.” When she saw Gaby turning pink she said, “Aw, stop that, Gabrielle, nobody blushes anymore, it’s like,
très gauche
. You’ve really got it for this guy, haven’t you?”

Gaby stared in the mirror, disconcerted. It wasn’t her, she thought. She wasn’t this sexy, ravishing creature. It was the costume, nothing more than that.

“I’m not bugging you, sugar,” Crissette went on quickly. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for you. If you like Dodd Brickell the Third, that’s fine with me.”

Gaby frowned. “It’s going to be hot wearing all this,” she said, changing the subject. “This is no great creative assignment. There’s no fashion news in a costume ball, except who spent the most money on some ridiculous outfit.”

Crissette shrugged. “A wig goes with that. A big white one with flowers and beads in it.”

“Forget it,” Gaby said, turning away. “I’d die of heatstroke in a wig.”

Crissette took off her bicorne hat and ran her fingers through her hair. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said abruptly, “giving David that apartment at your place.”

Gaby didn’t look at her. “I need someone there at night. Really.”

It was Crissette’s turn to frown. “Gabrielle, David’s not going to keep this job either. The feds know where all the unskilled jobs are in south Florida. They’ll make a sweep up in Hallandale and drag him right off that garbage truck, you wait and see.”

Gaby had stepped out of her costume and was slipping her street dress over her head. “I hope not. David deserves a break. Tell me, why on earth do people from the islands keep coming to Miami if it’s so hard to get a job here?”

“Because it isn’t,” Crissette said shortly. “You know why we got so many Haitians in south Florida? It isn’t just because they love the climate, honey. If Haitian illegals can just make it out to Belle Glade, they can get a job cutting sugar cane. You can’t get Americans to do a backbreaker job like that, but the Haitians are trained cane cutters. They know if they can just get some kind of boat into south Florida they can find work around Lake Okeechobee. There’s practically a whole town of Haitians living out there around the big sugar mills.” Crissette turned in front of the mirror, adjusting her jeans and expensive silk tank top from Rive Gauche. “Immigration doesn’t do anything to the sugar companies, only to the illegals when they find them. Same way with Mexican migrant workers.”

“You don’t think David’s in any danger at my place, do you?” Gaby asked, alarmed.

“Danger? The feds might pick up David at your place. They might charge
you
with harboring an illegal alien. You ever think of that?”

Gaby had always thought David was in the greatest danger on the job. She considered it for a long moment. “I’ll just have to take that chance,” she said quietly. “I really need him, Crissette. The grass is getting so high I have to fight my way to the front door.”

The other woman didn’t smile. “That house is spooky, Gabrielle.”

“Crissette, I’ve always lived there. It’s my home.”

“Have it your way,” Crissette said. “Just don’t forget I warned you. I don’t know what it was like in the old days, but it’s spooky now.”

Gaby remembered Crissette’s words as she parked her mother’s car in the driveway. “Spooky” was not a term she associated with her home, but she saw for the first time how it must look to outsiders—the Spanish-Moorish tower, the straggling bougainvillea that climbed the stucco facade, the overgrown hibiscus jungle that almost hid the front door. It had always been home, a safe place. It was strange to think of it any other way.

An oncoming thunderstorm had laid siege to the outlying parts of Miami just before Gaby had left the newspaper offices. She was not surprised to find the lights were out all over Palm Island. The house was echoingly quiet as she let herself in. She opened a few windows, then went to the kitchen to make a sandwich from a package of bologna she managed to find in the darkened depths of the already-warm refrigerator. After eating by candlelight, she went upstairs to her bedroom.

Thunderstorms and power failures were always expected in south Florida; Gaby’s bedside radio was equipped with batteries. The only way to live, she thought as she settled herself comfortably among the bed pillows, was to be able to afford a battery-operated TV as well. That was luxury. She turned the radio on and the sound of Julio Iglesias singing “Moonlight Lady” in Spanish filled the room.

With a strangled sound Gaby grabbed the radio and switched it off.

For a long time she lay in the dark, erasing thoughts of Julio Iglesias, anything Latin, problems with working in a hoopskirt at the upcoming extravaganza at Vizcaya, even David Fothergill, from her head. She ended up wondering about Dodd’s remark about fumigating the house. If the house had any odor at all it was mildew and an accumulation of dust. She’d long since stopped waiting for a return of those strange odors that had seemed to cling after the night of the
Santería
when David and Crissette had slept there.

Eventually, in the darkness and with the soothing sound of beating rain against the window, she dozed off.

Why, now, did the dream return?

All this time, of all times?

Even sleeping, some part of her consciousness told her that the heavy, beating thrumming, like drums or the pulsing of the human heart, signaled that her nightmare had begun. She moaned and turned restlessly from side to side to escape it, but she couldn’t. Then, with a loud roaring, a tearing of the dream fabric, the dark opened up in a bellow of flame.

Above the shrieking noise a voice called her name.

Tied to the bed, helplessly bound in the nightmare, Gaby struggled, unable to answer. Terror was there, but also great danger. Someone needed help.

She saw a trough of water in a night-black sea, parted by a roaring, blasting wave of sound that tore the air to shreds. At the edges of the trough the ocean curled whitely and fell back upon itself. The roaring was enough to deafen, spearing the mind with pain, an inhuman roar that penetrated the flesh and lodged in the bones, howling, inescapable.

No, no!
she tried to tell it, filled with fear of that dark, brooding terror. Nothing listened.

The maw of flames opened up. She was looking into a metal throat of fire filled with blue and yellow flames. Something familiar, something she had seen over and over in everyday life, but failed to recognize.

Then she knew there were men in a dark, cramped place, bent over flickering lights. The sense of violent speed was there. The inescapable roar of jet engines.

Gaby came awake, on her feet by the side of the bed, screaming.

Around her the darkened bedroom still reverberated with a throbbing, pulsing, roaring assault on the senses. She lifted her violently trembling hands to her face, remembering. Men were there in the twilight cockpit of blinking lights. Oh God, she knew now what that was! Their words, repeated over and over, hoarsely. Someone needed help. One husky voice was heartrendingly familiar.

In her dreams James Santo Marin called to her. Only a fragment, like a bad, interrupted radio transmission. The black trough of the sea opened, formed by the screaming expulsion of heated gases from a jet engine as it skimmed the surface.